robo-advisor
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Brian Barnes
Brian Barnes is the founder and CEO of M1, a Chicago-based personal finance platform that blends investing, borrowing, and spending into one automated 'finance super app.' He started investing in the fifth grade with a real brokerage account opened by his parents, studied economics at Stanford, and launched M1 in 2016 after concluding that the tools for managing money had barely improved in two decades. M1 has raised more than $320 million, reached unicorn valuation, and grown to roughly a million members and billions in assets under management.
Margaret Hartigan
Margaret Hartigan is the founder and CEO of Marstone, a Providence-based digital wealth management platform that banks and financial institutions white-label to deliver investing and planning tools to clients of all means. A former top-quintile Merrill Lynch financial advisor, she launched Marstone in 2013 to demystify and humanize finance, raised a Series B in 2024, and was named Innovator of the Year at the 2025 US Fintech Awards.
Qian Liu
Qian Liu is a fintech operator and data scientist who helped build the robo investing movement from the inside. A computer scientist by training - PhD in machine learning from Penn, BS from Tsinghua - she was an early member of the Wealthfront founding team and its Director of Research, then Head of Data at GoFundMe, then Chief Data Officer at Guideline, the small-business 401(k) platform. When Gusto acquired Guideline, she moved into a leadership role at Gusto, where the brokerage entity sits inside its HR, payroll and benefits platform serving small and medium businesses. In 2024 she co-authored 'The Little Book of Robo Investing' with Elizabeth MacBride, turning a decade of building automated investing products into a plain-spoken guide for ordinary savers.
Carlos Garcia
Carlos Garcia is the founder and CEO of Finhabits, a bilingual money app built to close the wealth gap for U.S. Latinos. An MIT-trained engineer who spent nearly two decades on Wall Street, he turned the realization that he once had no idea what a 401(k) was into a platform that lets people start investing for as little as $5 a week. Finhabits has grown to more than 800,000 members and earned recognition from Goldman Sachs and Fast Company.
Mike Sha
Mike Sha is the CEO and co-founder of Tandems (formerly SigFig), a San Francisco-based fintech company that builds AI-native software for financial institutions. Starting as a contributor to Amazon Prime's invention and the Amazon Visa Card launch, Sha co-founded Wikinvest in 2006 with Parker Conrad, which evolved into SigFig and then Tandems - now powering over $60 billion in assets across 2 million client accounts at firms like Wells Fargo, UBS, Scotiabank, Citizens Financial, and New York Life.
Jon Xu
Jon Xu is a General Partner at Y Combinator, the world's most influential startup accelerator, having joined full-time in May 2025 after serving as a Visiting Group Partner for the S24 batch. A YC alum himself, he co-founded FutureAdvisor (YC S10) - one of the first robo-advisors - which was acquired by BlackRock in 2015 for an estimated $150-200M. With an MIT Computer Science degree and stints at Microsoft, Canvas Ventures, and as an angel investor, Xu brings rare dual-sided credibility: he has both built a company through YC and now helps shape the next generation of founders from the partner seat.